Poverty Medicine: A GP and medical educator’s journey

(Notes for my lecture to the North and East London GP Educators’ conference)

At my last appraisal, I was criticised for not having more clinical conditions in my CPD (Continuing Professional Development) – “where” my appraiser asked, “was kidney disease, asthma, Diabetes, and Heart Failure?” I couldn’t think of an answer, it wasn’t that I was short of CPD, it’s just that my learning needs, the things I struggled with most as a GP were my difficulties in trying to help people with chronic pain, anxiety and depression, loneliness, severe obesity, shame, self-loathing and self-harm – the consequences of deprivation and adverse childhood experiences. It wasn’t that the weren’t also suffering from heart and lung disease and the rest – they were, to a huge extent, it’s just that managing that these diseases wasn’t half as challenging as the rest. And most of the time it didn’t seem to be…